WPR14FA302 · Cessna 172K P
Cessna 172K P · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Beaver Municipal Airport (U52) to Mesquite Airport (67L)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR14FA302
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 2 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172K P
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N84754
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Beaver Municipal Airport (U52), Beaver, UTTo Mesquite Airport (67L), Mesquite, NV
- Aircraft age
- About 45 years (built 1969)
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Maneuvering · low-altitude flying
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The newly certificated private pilot and his passenger, who was the pilot's brother, were making a personal cross-country flight in a rented airplane. The pilot's parents were making the trip along the same route via automobile and were expecting to meet their sons at the destination. The group was communicating via cell phone and text messaging. The parents, who were ahead of the flight, received a message that, due to wind, the airplane had landed. Although the parents offered to drive back and pick up their sons, the pilot asked that they wait and see if the wind abated. A short time later, the pilot reported that the wind had abated and that he was en route to the destination.
Along the route to the destination, the highway that the pilot was following passed through a narrow, winding, steep-walled river canyon. A motorist reported seeing the airplane low overhead in the canyon following the highway. As the airplane approached the southwest (exit) end of the canyon, the witness saw the airplane make an abrupt left roll to an inverted position and impact a steep canyon wall.
Examination of the accident site indicated that the airplane impacted the canyon wall about 100 ft above the level of the highway. Postaccident examination of the airplane confirmed flight control continuity, and signs consistent with the engine producing power at the time of impact were noted. No mechanical anomalies were found.
The closest weather station, located about 20 miles from the accident site, reported that, near the time of the accident, the wind varied between 200º and 240º at 9 to 17 knots gusting to 27 knots with a peak gust of 31 knots reported about 15 minutes before the accident. It is likely that, as the airplane neared the canyon exit, it encountered high winds entering the narrow canyon from the desert, which rolled the airplane to the left and inverted as the pilot was turning left to follow the highway. Because the pilot was operating the airplane at low altitude and in close proximity to terrain, he was unable to recover before the airplane impacted the canyon wall.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain airplane control when the airplane encountered high gusting wind while conducting low altitude flight in a narrow canyon, which resulted in an inflight collision with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR14FA302
- Event ID
- 20140720X30534
- Case number
- WPR14FA302
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2014-07-21.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 53ae3d62f45489fd4948bb3442b3d8488a307c09df484a02d2b3bedb2c8b4f9a; retrieved 2026-09-14T17:22:04.381Z.